Apigee Test: Take the Pulse of Your APIs

We’ve renamed API Health & expanded it to speed customers’ go-live

Srinivasulu Grandhi

Feb 19, 2016

We introduced API Health last year to enable DevOps teams to continuously monitor the health of their APIs from various geographic locations and receive alerts about any anomalies so they can quickly restore API service levels. The sooner the API provider knows about a problem, the lower the overall impact on the API consumers.

Over the last six months, many Apigee customers adopted API Health to monitor their APIs. We’re gratified by the trust placed in us and for all the valuable input that continues to shape our solution.

We realized that a probe is nothing but a test case that is scheduled to run at a particular frequency from a set of global locations. Another thing we learned is that while some companies have their API developers deploy to production after going through a very robust CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) pipeline, others have a more manual process that requires API artifacts to go across teams.

We’ve had an opportunity to help our customers speed up their go-live, and we’ve integrated the lessons we’ve learned into Apigee Test, the next iteration of the product we launched in beta as Apigee Health (its new home is https://test.apigee.com/). Apigee Test delivers all the functionality of API Health, and adds some important capabilities that accelerate the ability to take APIs live.

Test cases and test repositories

Having a central repository of test cases contributed by and available to anyone in the API team tremendously speeds up API go-live; this of course requires us to support APIs that manage the test repository and APIs that schedule probes for monitoring.

For example, your operations team can pick up APIs from a test repository and schedule them as “probes” without knowing all the details of your API run-time behavior. Your API product manager can easily pick up the test cases and promote them as sample use cases on your developer portal.

Your CI pipeline can pick up a set of API tests to run upon a particular code change. How about the ability to pick up test cases and run locally in your development environment while you’re building APIs ?

We’ve been working hard to evolve API Health into supporting a rich set of APIs, a JSON-based test definition, a test repository, and of course the monitoring ability you all love.

Soon we’ll launch APIs that will enable your API teams to do all of the above. Following that, we will be launching a local runtime that enables your API development teams to not only create tests during development but run them on their test environments.

Thanks for all your support and feedback. We are committed to help you launch your APIs at speed.